Update: OpenCV 2.4.2 now comes with the very new cv::FaceRecognizer. Please see the very detailed documentation at:
- http://docs.opencv.org/trunk/modules/contrib/doc/facerec/index.html
I have released libfacerec, a modern face recognition library for the OpenCV C++ API (BSD license). libfacerec has no additional dependencies and implements the Eigenfaces method, Fisherfaces method and Local Binary Patterns Histograms. Parts of the library are going to be included in OpenCV 2.4.
The latest revision of the libfacerec is available at:
- https://github.com/bytefish/libfacerec
The library was written for OpenCV 2.3.1 with the upcoming OpenCV 2.4 in mind, so I don't support OpenCV versions earlier than 2.3.1. This project comes as a CMake project with a well-documented API, there's also a tutorial on gender classification. You can see a HTML version of the documentation at:
- http://www.bytefish.de/dev/libfacerec/
If you want to understand how those algorithms work, you might want to read my Guide To Face Recognition (includes Python and GNU Octave/MATLAB examples):
- http://www.bytefish.de/blog/face_recognition_with_opencv2
The relevant publications are:
- Turk, M., and Pentland, A. Eigenfaces for recognition.. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 3 (1991), 71–86.
- Belhumeur, P. N., Hespanha, J., and Kriegman, D. Eigenfaces vs. Fisherfaces: Recognition using class specific linear projection.. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 19, 7 (1997), 711–720.
- Ahonen, T., Hadid, A., and Pietikainen, M. Face Recognition with Local Binary Patterns.. Computer Vision - ECCV 2004 (2004), 469–481.
